The President's Advisory 1776 Commission Final Report 20 Teaching Americans About Their Country 2/4

The President’s Advisory #1776Commission Final Report 20 Teaching Americans About Their Country 2/4
The Decline of #AmericanEducation
This pronounced decline of American education began in the late nineteenth century when progressive reformers began discarding the traditional understanding of education. The old understanding involved conveying a body of transcendent knowledge and practical wisdom that had been passed down for generations and which aimed to develop the character and intellect of the student. The new education, by contrast, pursued contradictory goals that are at the same time mundane and unrealistically utopian.
In the view of these progressive educators, human nature is ever-changing, so the task of the new education was to remake people in order to improve the human condition. They sought to reshape students in the image they thought best, and education became an effort to engineer the way students think.
This new education deemed itself “pragmatic,” subordinating America’s students to the demands of the new industrial economy for skills-based, jobs-oriented training. Rather than examine the past for those unchanging truths and insights into our shared humanity, students today are taught to assume that the founders’ views were narrow and deficient: that’s just how people used to think, but we know better now.
Under this new approach, the only reason to study the works of Aristotle, Shakespeare, or America’s founders is not to learn how to be virtuous, self-governing citizens, not to learn anything true, good, or beautiful, but to realize how such figures of yesteryear are unfit for the present day. Such a vision of education teaches that ideas evolve as human progress marches on, as supposedly old and worn ideas are cast aside on the so-called “wrong side of history.”
This new education replaced humane and liberal education in many places, and alienated Americans from their own nature, their own identities, and their own place and time. It cuts students off from understanding that which came before them. Like square pegs and round holes, students are made to fit the latest expert theory about where history is headed next.
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Since the 1960s, an even more radicalized challenge has emerged. This newer challenge arrived under the feel-good names of "liberation" and "social justice.” Instead of offering a comprehensive, unifying human story, these ideological approaches diminish our shared history and disunite the country by setting certain communities against others. History is no longer tragic but melodramatic, in which all that can be learned from studying the past is that groups victimize and oppress each other.
By turning to bitterness and judgment, distorted histories of those like Howard Zinn or the journalists behind the “1619 Project” have prevented their students from learning to think inductively with a rich repository of cultural, historical, and literary referents. Such works do not respect their students’ independence as young thinkers trying to grapple with social complexity while forming their empirical judgments about it. They disdain today’s students, just as they doubt the humanity, goodness, or benevolence in America’s greatest historical figures. They see only weaknesses and failures, teaching students truth is an illusion, that hypocrisy is everywhere, and that power is all that matters.
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Nevertheless, within a few years it became clear that students in states that “voluntarily” adopted Common Core suffered significantly lower academic performance and fewer marketable skills than comparable cohorts of students who had been educated outside the Common Core regime. This system of micromanaged “standards” proved to be a recipe for bureaucratic control and sterile conformity instead of a pathway towards better instruction. We learned from the failed Common Core experiment that one-size-fits-all national models are a blueprint for trivializing and mechanizing learning.
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#1776Project
The-Presidents-Advisory-1776-Commission-Final-Report.pdf (archives.gov) https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/The-Presidents-Advisory-1776-Commission-Final-Report.pdf
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I am a proud American, blessed father, a staunch 2A activist and a Marine Corps Veteran that just happens to be 100% blind. This is a look at the Second Amendment, firearms, self Defense, Constitutionally protected rights, Liberty and Freedom from the perspective of a Visually Impaired, Blind American.
#PatriotInTheDark
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